Thoughts I Have While Looking at the Freckle on the Back of Your Ear

I just noticed it

Photo: Unsplash / Jessica Flavia

My fingers are a dune buggy race down the endless sands of your back, and then they’re a squadron of submarines descending through the uncharted depths of your hair to your very top’s very bottom.

And after so many years mapping your body and its complex topographies, I spy a secret: a single freckle lurking on the back of your ear where I can barely see it and where you couldn’t possibly.

And I begin to imagine the freckle as a rogue star — a fugitive? a pariah? a discoverer of worlds? — launched out of the orbit of the resplendent constellation of freckles on your cheek, and out into the wildest beyonds of the universe of your skin.

I imagine that freckle as an eye, and the back of your ear as a tiny exquisite cyclops gazing back at me from the back of you; a pupil as a darkside sister to your frontside pupils, which also look black because they’re portals to your inside, where all your beauty begins.

I imagine that freckle is the mark of some nefarious shadow government organization that abducted you at birth — a nearly imperceptible scar from a neonatal surgery where they implanted your brain through your ear with a tracking device and superhuman integrity and light, and back at HQ in an undisclosed location outside Albuquerque, Larry has just returned to his desk in the control room forty minutes late and slightly tipsy from some taco Tuesday lunchtime margs with Greg, and checks the monitors and murmurs “That can’t be right…” and then with sobering concern, “ You’re gonna want to see this, Sir. She seems to be getting…stronger.”

And I realize that sometimes I’m thinking “freckle on the back of your ear” and other times I’m thinking “freckle behind your ear” like it’s a benevolent insect I’d probably nickname Matt Daemon, which constantly buzzes inches behind you to whisper tiny timely encouragement or warn you of oncoming danger.

Or maybe the freckle is a special hearing aid that serves as the world’s first (and smallest!) Bullshit Detector™.

Or maybe the freckle isn’t the eye of a cyclops but of a fish

, and on the other side of your ear is the eye’s invisible counterpart

, and as you walk, your ears swim through the ocean of the atmosphere

, and I know your bottom half doesn’t have fins or gills

, but technically you’d still be part-human, part-sea creature

; in other words, an instant mermaid — just add water.

If you liked this, check out “Extremely Short Letters (To All the Versions I’ve You I’ve Never Met).”